Interleaved speech-language models undergo an implicit transcription phase where spoken words become decodable as text tokens in intermediate layers, despite no speech recognition training. Up to 77% of the data shows the spoken word appearing as a top candidate text prediction, followed by a transition to text-based next-word prediction before returning to speech. This behavior is influenced by interleaved training and text LM initialization, and correlates with spoken knowledge performance.
Speech-Text Models Latently Transcribe Speech in Intermediate Layers
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